


There's No Room in This Hell (There's No Room in the Next)

by Shriek



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Percy Has Issues, Whitestone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-26 07:03:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9872720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shriek/pseuds/Shriek
Summary: Percy ruminates on castles and those that inhabit them.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This fic kind of just... happened. And when Taliesin said during Talks Machina that Percy doesn't want to go back and take his place in Whitestone, I knew I had to post it, because I like being right.
> 
> Title from Early Sunsets Over Monroeville by My Chemical Romance

There’s not much to be said for castles, when one doesn't have the people to fill the rooms. A lot of cold stone and cobwebs. Unused rooms aren’t heated, after all. And cleaned half as often. Just long enough for the resident spiders to expand their territories beyond the usual dark corners and into the room proper, before they’re swept away. One could almost feel bad for those spiders; building a home again and again only to have it destroyed as soon as it takes shape. One could wish to turn the key and lock those unused rooms away like they no longer exist. To give them over to the needs of spiders. But that’s how one ends up with ghosts.

It’s a shame, really. Spiders and ghosts, they tend to congregate in the same places, when allowed to. But while spiders are useful at keeping bugs in check, ghosts must be kept in check like bugs. Allow ghosts out of the dark corners of the mind and into the rooms of a castle, like spiders spinning webs across unused furniture, and one will end up with an entirely uninhabitable space, before long.

So the cobwebs must be cleared out and the ghosts must be kept at bay, and those that inhabit the castle must grow themselves to fill as many of the cold corners as they can. It’s truly exhausting work. Hence why castles are best suited to large crowds of large people. Bright, loud, important people who can fill rooms with their singular presence. There _is_ a reason that castles are home to nobility. 

People born into that sort of life learn to expand themselves either by personality or by number. Which came first: the large noble family, or the castle that needed to be occupied by it? One would think, of course, that the excessively expanding noble families built the castles to suit their needs. But ask any breed of royal brat about where they grew up, and they’ll tell you of rooms no one entered. Rooms with forgotten purpose. Even the youngest of families seemed to come up in labyrinthian homes, always somehow bigger than need would suggest they had been built. And there is no such thing as a young castle. They are all built from the ruins of another, on the land of one fallen, from the idea of one seen. They are all waiting to be reclaimed by ghosts.

So when a family of nobles, excessive in number and large in presence like any other, is bled down to just two small people, two siblings whose presence could never hope to be enough to keep the ghosts at bay, is it unreasonable to want to stay away? Is it odd to affect and bluster in the face of people who would never know that he is trying to fill the void of five siblings and a Lord and Lady?

There is not enough of him to spread thin into the empty rooms his family once occupied. And Percy knows too much of shadows to think that he has any right trying to illuminate them. It isn’t fair, he knows, to leave Cassandra to try and keep their family of ghosts at bay on her own, but he fears the ever growing cobwebs. He fears what demons may lurk with them if he returns before he has proven himself a good enough man to withstand them. He aches for his home, for every well worn Whitestone path, but he has no love to be lost for the job of occupying places better left to spiders and ghosts.


End file.
